As votes from South Africa’s elections were being counted last month, a senior African National Congress politician, Nomvula Mokonyane, held court wearing a yellow long-sleeved top with the face of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela emblazoned on the back.

Across the room at the national vote counting centre, far left Economic Freedom Fighters official Poppy Mailola wore a black T-shirt with an image of Winnie plastered across repetitions of her name.

The start of the country’s democratic era saw Madikizela-Mandela – whose freedom fighting was often overshadowed by the former husband whose name she helped make famous – reviled for murders committed by a gang she had created.

But disappointment that democracy has failed to improve the lives of millions of South Africans has triggered a growth in her appeal and her refusal to compromise, particularly since her death in 2018 at the age of 81.

“I feel we over-negotiated,” she said of the talks that ended apartheid, in the 2017 documentary Winnie. “We dreamed of a South Africa that was totally free of racism. A South Africa where everyone would be fed equally, where youth would be employed.”

Zikhona Valela, a historian, said: “Winnie represents the work that we’ve yet to do, that we’ve yet to complete.”

Male ANC leaders including Mandela and Chris Hani, the leader of the South African Communist party and the ANC’s armed wing uMkhonto we Sizwe, are given more leeway than she was for having supported violence, Valela said.

“One of the reasons why she is vilified is because of how she unapologetically took up space, as a leader and not just the wife of a leader,” said Valela.

Winifred Madikizela was born in 1936 in Bizana, a rural town in what is now the Eastern Cape province, part of an aristocratic, educated Mpondo family. When 20, she met the 37-year-old Mandela in Johannesburg. She was already self-assured and embarking on a prestigious social work career, said Jonny Steinberg, author of the book Winnie & Nelson. “She arrived in Johannesburg barely out of her teens, in a massively patriarchal world, and didn’t for a moment doubt that she can and should do whatever men did, including going to the public sphere and exercising power there,” Steinberg said.

While Nelson was jailed for 27 years from 1963, Winnie was constantly persecuted by the apartheid state: tortured, imprisoned in solitary confinement, her home repeatedly raided, kept under house arrest and then banished to a remote town from 1977 to 1985. There, she fought to expose apartheid’s horrors and keep Mandela’s name alive.

When she returned to the township of Soweto in 1986, it was riven with violence. She set up the Mandela United Football Club, initially to bring two warring groups of young black men together to live at her house. It soon evolved into a gang.

Club members were involved in at least 18 killings, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a non-prosecutory body led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to uncover human rights violations committed during apartheid, found. Most notorious was the abduction and murder in 1988 of 14-year-old Stompie Seipei, accused of being a police informer.

Madikizela-Mandela always denied any involvement in or knowledge of the killings. “I was seething with rage,” she said in Winnie, about Tutu begging her during her appearance before the commission to apologise for her role in ‘what went wrong’. “I wasn’t going to say sorry, as if I was responsible for apartheid.”

The documentary, by French director Pascale Lamche, implied the apartheid state and the ANC used the deaths to discredit her. Its screening on South African TV in 2018 fuelled the reappraisal of her legacy.

While Madikizela-Mandela is probably still not as popular as her ex-husband, many younger South Africans compare her favourably to him, thinking her uncompromising stance could have secured a better transition from apartheid. Consequently, ANC and EFF politicians have deployed her image as they battled for support and legitimacy – although both lost vote share in the 29 May elections.

The EFF, whose leader Julius Malema spoke at her funeral, claimed they, not the ANC, should get the credit for a Johannesburg road being renamed Winnie Mandela Drive last year.

“Winnie Mandela is one of our heroines,” said Jeremiah Kingsley Mamabolo, South Africa’s high commissioner to the UK, who joined the ANC in exile in 1976. “The attempt to try to contrast Nelson Mandela against Winnie, it’s not helpful at all. Both of them contributed hugely to the struggle in South Africa, in different ways.”

Valela, the historian, said she had noticed a positive trend away from stereotypical assessments of both Winnie and Nelson. “There’s a push and pull, and more room for nuance, rather than just clearcut pronouncements on people’s legacies,” she said.